By way of preface: on the title -- Passion itself: poetry -- Eros, spirit, pleasure: Plato's beginning -- The passions as extremes: Aristotle as the founder of passion studies -- The pathology and therapy of the passions: stoicism through Cicero -- The passions sited: Thomas Aquinas and the soul in sum -- The passions of the soul as actions of the body: Descartes and the obscurity of clear and distinct ideas -- Human affect as our body's vitality: Spinoza and the (...) price we pay for resolving all oppositions -- The passions as reflective impressions: Hume and the price we pay for scepticism -- Mood as news from nothing: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the age of anxiety -- Our times: theorizing -- By way of conclusion: on the questions. (shrink)

This collection of aphorisms and thoughts gathers 30 years of observations about the external world and on the nature of our internal selves. Compiled from scraps of paper dating from the early 1970s, these bits of wisdom include notes about the world around us that are often thought, but not often said; sightings of internal vistas and omens; and observations on music, the passage of time, America, the body, domesticity, and intimacy.